Editorial
Can you imagine my delight when I opened an e-mail recently which offered the use of photographs from a period when our glorious sport was in its infancy for my website Trials Guru? The offer came out of the blue, and from a very highly respected source, David Wood, formerly of C.H. Wood (Bradford), who produced all the cine films for a plethora of large companies associated with motorsport worldwide. The photographs were his late father’s, and he wanted to make sure that some of them would be seen because many have never been presented to the public.
David Wood is a motorcycle enthusiast, as was his father Charles Harold Wood before him. I met David at the Scott Trial Reunion dinner at the Ripon Spa Hotel in the November of 2014 organised by Sid Lampkin, but the connection actually went much further back than that meeting at Ripon. The Wood family had been filming a movie called ‘Quartet for Two Wheels’ in 1967, which had been commissioned by Castrol Oils. Part of it was filmed at a scrambles event in Lanarkshire, Scotland and my late father Arnott Moffat had been instrumental in making some of the arrangements to enable the filming to take place.
Over the years David Wood kept bumping into Arnott annually at the Scottish Six Days Trial, where he also filmed for the Yamaha Motor Company to produce their promotional film called ‘Mick Andrews Trials Champion’ in 1973.
David clearly remembered those meetings and described Arnott Moffat as a ‘very helpful gentleman’, and to be fair I knew my Dad had great respect for the Wood family, their achievements in the British film making industry, their enthusiasm for the sport of motorcycling and their products.
So the moral of the story is never take for granted that good things can happen; they happen because people want them to, and connections, especially those made in a sport, can last for a lifetime. It is without doubt that David Wood based his decision to share his father’s wonderful images with my website on the experience he gained when having sound dealings with likeminded people. It’s called respect.